Opinion

Slings and arrows: Outrageous misfortune of darts' Olympic snub

You can’t help but do a spot of wondering this time of year. Just last week I got to navel-gazing for a rude length of time about whether it was Friday or Saturday. These are matters which one MUST. NOT. STUFF. UP.

The correct answer was paramount. If it was Friday, I had a golf match of huge importance that afternoon. If it was Saturday, I had been fortunate enough to get tickets to an underground Cold Chisel concert that evening, so the morning would be consumed with grading my menagerie of black T-shirts.

Following a mini sausage roll washed down with a double shot of Red Bull, I settled on it being Friday. Though I wasn’t convinced until I spied the day’s edition of this newspaper at the servo. Such are life’s challenges.

Having successfully ascertained which day of the week it was, I got to doin’ some more wondering and thinking and stuff. I asked, rhetorically and in silence, why it is that competitive sailing is even a thing, let alone an Olympic discipline? Could you harness a murder of the finest Oxbridge minds to conjure a sport more mind-numbingly dull? This whole Sydney to Hobart nonsense has got to stop (apologies to the skipper of one of the super mega-maxi big boats, who is a good friend of mine).

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Not “stop” in that the boats should be somehow prevented from sailing - it’s a free world after all. But instead cease, in the sense that I can’t understand for the life of me why which boat gets to Hobart first is any more important than the results of last Friday’s golf match (I won. Thanks for asking).

Sailing … geez, nobody can even (be bothered to) understand what goes on during the race, or how the “handicapping” system works. Nobody has even heard of most of the boats (probably because they change their names, year on year), while one gets the impression that sailing is – how shall we put this delicately – the exclusive domain of a select few.

Sailing has been an Olympic sport since the inception of the Modern Games in 1896; and sailing events have featured in all bar a couple of renewals of the Games since. Australia does, it’d be fair to say, produce very good sailors. But honestly, have you ever sat down and watched five minutes of the wretched sport? Utter, indecipherable rubbish.

Then, by way of diametric contrast, I began to wonder thus: why on earth is darts not an Olympic sport? What is so magnificent about sailing which is absent from darts? As part of the Games, darts would be the blazing-hot show of Tokyo, whereas it’ll probably be so hot on the water that sailing’s starter gun fires sometime around the kebab-and-fighting hour of 3am.

Peter 'Snakebite' Wright lifts the Sid Waddell trophy after seeing off Michael van Gerwen in the world championship final.Credit:Getty

Darts is spectacular. And worldwide, and egalitarian and embracing of all comers. Germans, Lithuanians, Indians, Singaporeans and the Dutch (among others) play against each other. Men and women can compete in the same draw – tell me the progression of England’s Fallon Sherrock to the third round of the world championship wasn’t the greatest thing for women’s sport in 2019. Seriously.

Any sport, boiled down, is simple. Spearing postage-stamp targets from seven-and-three-quarter feet away is, on paper anyway, less enticing than the thought of sailboats meandering around buoys on Sydney Harbour. Darts should not be a spectacle of standing. But darts is what so many other sports aren’t: exquisite, unpretentious and vibrant. Sublime and ridiculous; precision par excellence.

So, I wondered, if sailing is an Olympic sport, why not darts? Skateboarding, surfing and rock climbing have weaseled their respective paths into the Olympic program; rap dancing and graffiti could be next. Even archery and curling - when you think about it, each is an anodyne variation of the principles of darts - are Olympic sports. So why can’t Peter “Snakebite” Wright - the new darts world champion - be an Olympian too?

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This morphed into wondering debate rages – and it does – over Tim Paine captaining the Australian Test team. Leaving aside the question of whether Steve Smith actually wants the job (for the sake of argument, let’s assume he does), Paine has led the regeneration of the side in the past two years; captained a team that retained the Ashes on English soil and won every Test as captain this summer. Removing him would be S.T.U.P.I.D.

Which, finally (and this is the point) led me to consider a hopelessly vexed question, of leadership and legacy: is Margaret Court properly off her chops, essentially demanding she be invited to, and lavishly honoured at, this year’s Australian Open, just as Rod Laver was 12 months ago?

On one hand, Court amassed more major singles titles (24) than anyone else ever – female or male. Serena Williams has won one less championship and may never surpass Court (and if Williams doesn’t, there’s no other player on the horizon who will come close). Between 1960 and 1973, Court won nigh on 93 per cent of her matches. Ninety-three per cent. Over 14 years.

In 1970 - half a century ago, this year - Court won Wimbledon and the Australian, French and US opens. That’s an achievement worthy of celebration, and should rightly be recognised. Purely on tennis records, it’s only fair the sport celebrates Laver and Court in similar ways (Laver won the men’s calendar-year slam in 1969).

Margaret Court and Rod Laver both won calendar grand slamsCredit:AP, Shaughn and John

On the other hand, Court is a surgically divisive figure. Also in 1970, Court gushed about how well “organised” South Africa’s apartheid system was, and how much she loved that country. In 1990, regarding Martina Navratilova (the Wimbledon champion of that year, for the ninth and final time), Court declared it was “sad” children might look up to her. Because Navratilova was homosexual, and her life had gone “astray”.

In 2017, Court declared women’s professional tennis “full of lesbians”, and that transgender children were the work of “the devil”. She said she would boycott Qantas over its support for same-sex marriage. And only this week, Court doubled down, with repugnant statements at the pulpit of her Pentecostal church in Perth.

Court’s beliefs are what they are. Underpinned by a Folau-esque literal interpretation of the Bible, it’s hard to believe any amount of column space devoted to the encouragement of a more enlightened viewpoint would make a jot of difference. And Court is perfectly entitled to hold any view she chooses, however odious it may be.

Now perhaps it’s a serious case of tin ear; perhaps it's that Court is possessed with a concentration of hubris more potent than Robert Mugabe was ever infected with. Because here’s the thing I don’t get: as much as I wonder, as hard as my mind can wonder, in the summer sun – why on God’s earth would Court even want to be celebrated at Melbourne Park this month? What does she think is going to happen?

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We know how these things go down. Small armies of protesters will blockade the perimeter of the tennis precinct. Those of influence will renew demands that Margaret Court Arena be renamed, to nothing else in particular. And any presentation to, or of, Margaret Court will be met with mocking scorn or markedly less praise than was afforded to the cheating, churlish and snidely Patrick Reed at the Presidents Cup.

I wonder whether Court’s all-expenses-paid holiday to Melbourne (reclining on the Indian Pacific, noting her refusal to fly with the national carrier) will end up being unedifying in the extreme; a macabre spectacle.

And moreover, recognising, celebrating or acknowledging Court will become absurd and pointless - unless the assembled great and good unify their voices.